The first visible fruits of Adrian Holovaty doing his thing for The Washington Post have appeared. Working with Derek Willis, Adrian used Django to build an interactive database of congressional votes, House and Senate, going back to 1991. Over and above general availability, the site also lets you monitor your congress critt, errr, representatives, using RSS feeds. Brilliant!!
Crafty news organizations will increasingly see a big part of their business as developing high local profile (of course this is US national, but it's beneath Google/Yahoo!/MS scale) software sites and services for the public good. Given the continuing importance of online advertising, such efforts are one way to differentiate from the usual ad network suspects.
Oh, and wash, rinse, repeat, for any public records database, which newspapers have a wealth of experience digging into. Speaking of which, Adrian's old boss Rob Curley, pulled off a similar feat when he was running online in Topeka, if I remember correctly.